Not without a certain pleasure I announce that I got Rapache fixed and working again.

Rapache is a graphical user tool to help you configure Apache2. It allows easy creation of virtual name hosts and modules activation without prior knowledge of configuration files.

I still have to mess with the packaging thing, and there are certain trade-offs, but anybody interested can finally download a working version.

To install it run the following commands

sudo apt-get install python-crypto python-openssl python-lxml
sudo apt-get install python-glade2 python-gnome2-extras python-gksu2
sudo apt-get install python-gtk2 python-gtksourceview2 gksu bzr
bzr branch lp:rapache

Once you’re done, you can run it with the following commands:

cd rapache
sudo ./rapache

Note that Rapache now requires sudo, but it will nevertheless ask for your password the first time you try to do anything. It’s glitchy and patchy but at least it works.

Also there is no more tray icon (not a problem for Unity users I guess) and the status bar displays an ‘apache not reacheable’ message unregarding the real apache status.

Still you get the same easy virtualhost creation, syntax highlighted source editor, module activation/removal we all used to love.

A word of warning, as my computer is still running Ubuntu 10.10 Rapache is untested on 11.04 and 11.10. But it’s worth a try. Let me know how it runs

You can find more about Rapache in my previous posts.

If so, I propose Ozzy Osbourne.

Please help my cause.

Since I posted about Canonical’s Music Store project, a few comments rained down from above. I’ll abuse my blog to give some answers.

Oh, and you forgot to say “Welcome back, Stefano” !

Michael:
This would be great, but it just seems to have a pipedreamy feel to it. Perhaps I’m too cynical to believe it would actually happen.

I don’t see any reason for it to be unlikely. I think chances are it will happen.

Linux Affic:
I can NOT stand iTunes. It is without a doubt, unquestionably the most overrated useless POC software ever designed. With that said, it would be nice to see a ‘GNU/Linux’ based music store similar to iTunes/Rhapsody. Just with a COMPLETELY different interface!! Automatic conversion of mp3/wmas to .ogg’s would be a plus.

My guess is that the only 2 people who actually really like the iTunes interface are Steve Jobs.. and his dog.

Expanding the last statement, the format is one of the points that make Music Store controversial. The vast majority of Mp3 players plays, guess., Mp3. So the Mp3 format is needed to reach the mainstream folk. On the other hand, Ogg is needed and strongly required by the FOSS folks. Surely an automatic conversion would be handy.

ghabuntu:
Hello Stef
You know I see nothing wrong if we should have such a service from Canonical. If that is one of the means through which the company can stand on its feet financially and continue to give us what we are getting, I see no problem.

One thing I can be sure of is that if such a thing should materialize, then the music is going to be in the open format.

I see nothing wrong as well, for sure ! I will support the project, whether Foss or closed source.

Do0d:
Doh! I blogged about this an hour ago and it seems it’s old news! Oddly enough we seem to have followed the same train of thought; something that got me expelled from university!

It does seem a tantalizing little discussion, and hopefully one that will be streamed (audio) as it’s incredibly vague as to what they’re proposing so far – more so with the regards to “Ubuntu One Music Store”.

Eheh, follow the leader. :-p

I’m joking of course. Beside that, you interestingly raise the same issue as I. There is no specification draft. Usually to have a proposal considered for discussion at UDS you have to create a detailed specification and market it to the rest of the community in the hope it will be considered for inclusion.

As this project comes from above, though, there is no draft, which feels disappointingly disorienting. Not a problem, as everything will be cleared out in 2 days. Still it leaves me wonder if it’s because of no time or because it is some kind of surprise.

As Mark Shuttleworth manifested recently some doubt about the “noise” in open development, may it be the second ? (please don’t flame me about this one, thanks)

Starcannon:
I never understood online music stores to be controversial; indeed they seem very mainstream and normal.I’ll buy music from Canonical if they make it happen.

Selling copyrighted items online and especially music and movies gets often controversial. DRM desire by the vendors comes often in the way. Pricing is much debated. And there’s the file format war (Mp3 ? Ogg ?), with patents and counter-patents. (even when the content is free of charge, see the HTML 5 debate).

Finally, there are the commercial agreements with the majors, which is the only way to get mainstream music into the store. And majors are not good puppies. Even Apple, which is incredibly powerful – given the market share of iPod/iTunes), had its problems to get good conditions from them.

Even beside the classic issues will the store publicize items from the “good stores” like Jamendo and Magnatune?

Will the store be open source ? Being part of Ubuntu One, I’d say no, not fully.

I like the project, but music stores always raise discussion, and being this the first large scale Linux’s one will likely shake things even more.

–

Oh, as the final thing, I’m not being evil, I’m just blogging

[screenshot picture shamefully stolen from the OMG ubuntu post about the store]

For those who don’t know, the Lucid UDS has begun today.

One of the most interesting yet controversial meetings is this: the Ubuntu One Music Store. What it will be is currently left to the imagination since no specification has apparently have been drafted yet. Selling music online has always been a controversial topic, and that adds interest in such a feature.

Also interesting, assuming the meeting’s name is meaningful and correct, the association between the Music Store and Ubuntu One, rather than with the Ubuntu Software Center.

Currently I don’t know any detail about this new project, the most obvious question is which kinds of commercial agreements will Canonical arrange with the music labels. Because the success of projects like are heavily dependent on the availability of a vast catalog of music as well as on a good price.

For sure we’d like to have Jamendo and Magnatune integrated!

2 other obvious questions are:

• Ubuntu doesn’t ship by default Mp3 codecs. Will this change or will the music be sold in a open format ?
• What about, *cough*, DRM ?

The meeting is on Wednesday, if you happen to follow it either live or remotely, be sure drop me a note to tell me more !

Update: rephrased a misleading sentence depicting the Uds meeting itself as controversial

Update 2: I addressed most of the comments in this post. Take a look !

The first image shows a colored title bar upon every notification. While the chance to display the urgency of notifications has been discussed, this work is just meant to be useful for debugging – at least for now.

The urgency bar will be displayed only in beta releases, to help the tester to debug and test how each applications uses notifications and spot possible abuses.

Having a bar looks similar to my interactive notifications concept. The purpose is very different, though.

Full video

The second video shows, other than a (what I believe is) a bugfix in the progress bar, a proximity fade mechanism. If you look the picture above, you’ll notice the notification started fading before the mouse got over it. Thumbs up, one thing I wished and never asked.

Full video

The last video shows blurring capabilities. Pretty nice, I’m unaware of the intended applications of such concept. Any clue, anyone ?

Full video (9 Mb!)

PS: The videos are hosted on Mirco’s website, but I can easily mirror those if hotlinking is not ok.

Really, you wouldn’t dare..

• rickspencer3 proposes pulling the gimp from the CD:
  • It takes up a lot of space that we need for couchdb, etc…
  • F-Spot has key features, like crop and red-eye removal
  • It’s a power user tool, users shouldn’t stumble into it
• Discussion points brought up that
  • The gimp currently uses 26 megs of space, 20 of which are documentation, which could be moved online
  • The gimp, though not totally user friendly, is very useful, and does not require “importing” to edit

ZOMG !

No offense to Rick Spencer but.. How reasonable is the rationale behind this ? That f-spot is enough ? Enough for what ? For laughing ?

How do I scale an image in f-spot ? If there’s a way, I have not been able to find it (same for red eyes). How do I annotate an image (putting text somewhere) ?

Yet people ask “Gimp is cool but.. should it belong to LiveCD?” I’ll give you a better question: what should belong to the LiveCD ?

Removing GIMP from the LiveCd fully defeats the showing off purpouse of the LiveCd and leaves you without any handy tool to perform even basic manipulation on images. Now, it can be just me, but I can’t find anything useful in that regard inside Jaunty’s f-spot.

I can’t see how f-spot belongs to the live cd more than the Gimp. And sure the Gimp UI sucks (at least, I hate it. Not that I love f-spot‘s though) but it can take burden of tasks that nothing else provides. Should we leave our users without even basic image manipulation, just like OS X users ? Shouldn’t Ubuntu be better than that ?

Resolution

The following decision has been taken:

• The current plan of record is:
  • Keep the gimp in the default install
  • If we need the room, switch the gimp to online only documentation
  • If we still need the room, kick it out altogether

Sanity prevailed. Sort of. I mean, I’m happy with at least the first two points of it.

I hate bringing up the old Mono issue (and my prophetic joke) every 2 minutes, but.. if you need space, why not strip 50mb of run-time ? How come it’s desirable to replace Rhythmbox with Banshee (based on minimal feature difference) and then having to strip the Gimp ?

An emergency plan would be to strip Mono, replace Banshee with Rhythmbox, replace Tomboy with Gnote (about which many untrue things have been told) and f-spot with gThumb or Solang (which is promising) and gain 40-50 mb of disk space. Not stripping the Gimp.

This is not out of Mono hate, is out of need.

The pop under technique is well known to any of you surfing porn highly advertised websites, once you close your current applications you’ll notice there’s a new window underneath.

Also, since the use of the technique is a (purposely) slightly more obstrusive, the limit of once a week has been set. Translated, even if newer updates are available, the update manager won’t automatically popup before 7 days since the last automatic appearance.

An awful lot of people didn’t like the change. More clearly said, the new behaviour has been marked as a regression. The numbers are quite impressing: 300+ comments on the main bug, and 27 duplicated bugs !

The planned behaviour

I’m currently unable how much of this has been effectively deployed, but what follows is how the whole is planned to behave:

• When security updates are available, Update Manager should open automatically within one day, and display those security updates plus any non-security updates that happen to be available. Test procedure: …
• When non-security-only updates are available, Update Manager should open automatically whichever is later: (a) one week after it was last open, whether that was manually or automatically, or (b) one week after updates were installed by any apt-powered method, including apt-get or aptitude (bug 334952). Test procedure: …
• When no updates are available, Update Manager should not open automatically at all. Test procedure: …
• When Add/Remove Applications, Synaptic, or a similar graphical tool is open (i.e. if apt/dpkg is locked) at the moment Update Manager would be scheduled to open, it should wait until they are closed (bug 334935). Test procedure: …

Also, since the new timed behavior may disappoint some, a preference dialog is planned. Here’s a mockup:

Why has that been done ?

I have been able to find out the following reasons:

• The new notifications system doesn’t allow to position bubbles anymore. That means that the old bubble containing the message ‘Click the icon to..’ has become suddenly dangerously confusing.
• And that could not be fixed with an interactive notification since the NotifyOSD also forbids interaction by design.
• The old icon is considered not obvious in meaning nor evident enough for new users
• A perceived advantage of the new method is that it requires just one click to perform the update, and on a much larger target than the 22px update icon.
• removing the notification icon will unclutter a bit the tray icon.

In a way, NotifyOSD somewhat forced the change. A little design change that forces to rethink another aspect, in a chain that may change in better or worse the whole experience.

Is there any problem with the new behavior ?

I believe so, like the many people who reported or commented the bug, I have some problem with it:

• invading the user workspace with unsolicited windows is seen as a sacrilege nowadays, and for good reasons. The whole point of using a tray icon was avoiding being obstrusive in any way.
• The popup even if unfocused, gets in the middle of your alt+tab flow
• updating now requires just one click. But if you want to skip it you also have to click instead of just waiting for the bubble to disappear.
• in the latter case, you’re left with no mnemonic note of the need to upgrade. You’re likely to forget it until the following week.
• ..and you’re left with no easy way to perform the upgrade. You have to look for the update manager in the menus. That’s even less trivial for a novice.
• as a result of the need to throttle the frequency of the update manager pop up, we need yet another configuration dialog.
• the proposed solution not to be bothered with the popup is to disable automatic update checking. Is this a joke ?
• having to artificially manage the frequency of the popup unnecessarily introduces a lag between the udpates deployment and the updates receptions by the user.
• popping a windows is abused (on the internet especially) and is likely to many users nerves.
• reverting to the old behaviour is not supported and won’t likely be present in future releases.

Will this be fixed ?

Well, Shuttleworth, after long discussions, marked the bug as wont-fix.

Frankly, considering the numbers of the protest and the good points raised, this doesn’t really show off any capability of Canonical to listen to their users.

Don’t take me wrong on this one, you sure have to develop a vision and pursue that, but you should still be able to acknowledge you mistakes.

It’s also pretty weird to popup the update manager because updating is important, and at the same time throttling it, consider the tray icon clutter while removing the only mnemonic of having an non-updated system.

My proposal

Since seems they’re not gonna go back on that one, I proposed to mix the old and new behaviour.

The orange icon should appear immediately. The update manager pop ups after, say, 2 days and maximum once a week.
That way novices would get the popup and expert users (since they’re supposed to upgrade often) are likely to never see it or at least see it less.

Also the orange icon would give the user an easy way to update if they accidentally close the update manager (or purposely postpone the upgrade).

The advantages of such approach:

• all the code required is likely to be already there.
• has no disadvantage for beginners
• is likely to appeal expert people at least a little bit more.

Before you comment, I perfectly know the issue has been over discussed. But since I still see people coming up with incredibly complex solution to get rid of the pop ups I felt urged to propose mine.

Should you have a proposal, why not adding it to the dedicated BrainStorm page ?

Let’s give them some useful feedback, take the survey !

While I’m waiting for feedback from them, I thought I could just copy-paste it here and know what you think about it.

I had an idea for notifications which require interaction.

I’ve read about morphing windows on the Wiki but I think that they would undermine consistency a bit. I’m attaching a mockup to this mail, but I’m so bad at using Gimp that much of what I’m proposing will be left to your ability of understanding me.

Currently notifications disappear on mouse hover. Morphing window, if I understood correctly, expand on mouse hover. Also, the notifications are a few pixel far from the edge of the screen.

Since I’d leave non interactive notifications untouched, what I’ll talk from now on, is only about interactive notifications/morphing windows.

My proposal is to let the notifications that allow for user interaction to be actually attached to the edge of the screen. The gap from such edge will be filled by a colored stripe. (see the attachment).

On mouse hover, the notification will disappear as usual. Only the colored stripe will remain visible (should also display a slightly lighter color to subtly indicate to the user it’s an interactive element).

If the user clicks  on the stripe, the notification window will appear, expanded, showing full markup and interactive controls. It will also probably cover near notifications (not an issue).
While the stripe is very thin (by design), it’s attached to the edge of the screen, making it very easy to click (it’s the same principle adopted by gnome panel’s trash bin, for example).
The notification should disappear on loss of focus (user click on another window) or if the stripe is clicked again.

Also notice the stripe is thin enough to only half cover the close button of any window near to the screen edge. That would make it at least possible to ignore the notification and and close a window under it.

Case edge: the user has multiple screens (or uses synergy). In that case clicking the stripe would not be that easy, but probably easier than going to the indicator applet.

The interaction stripe may be colored differently to indicate urgency (green, red, etc) and substitute the green point some people were talking about.

What do you think ?